Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Hinduism vs Hindutva: My first religious memory is shrouded in death

Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Hinduism vs Hindutva: My first religious memory is shrouded in death

To be dharmic, one has to be good, do right, neither be frightened by might nor act like a fool.

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Gopalkrishna Gandhi

January 19, 2018

ISSUE DATE: January 29, 2018

UPDATED: January 19, 2018 19:57 IST

Illustration by Tanmoy Chakraborty

My first 'religious' memory is shrouded in death.

And is yet more alive than most things I know.

Its 'home' is a photograph, black and white as photographs used to be in that era, of a man's, an old man's, prone figure on the floor. He is covered in white, his chest bare. Mourners are huddled beside it.

It.

How quickly, in a single moment, a man or a woman becomes 'the remains', 'the body', 'it'.Vasamsi jirnani yatha vihaya

Navani grhnati naro 'parani

Tatha sarirani vihaya jirnany

Anyani samyati navani dehi

(As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly, the soul gives up the old and accepts new ones.)

That is how the Bhagavad Gita describes Crossings. And that is how it was with this one.

I am told I was there at the time, all of three years, but have no memory of it, which does not matter, as that photograph, taken an hour or so after Gandhi was struck down, is immovably etched in my mind's eye. It has captured the moment for all time.

It has been and stays, for me, a deeply religious moment, a deeply Hindu moment. I have been to temples, attended discourses, read Hindu scripture. But there is no experience that I have been through-in this case entirely in my mind's eye-when I have felt more religious, more Hindu, than when I am one with that image, that moment, of a death which, for me, is about life and its renewal. About living.

The scene is accompanied in my mind by a scent, the scent of incense and a sound, the sound of prayer. I can hear in that picture Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram being sung. That being the song, which Gandhi had chosen, adapted to join Allah to Ishvar, introduced into his daily prayer congregations.

My mind has superimposed that fragrance and that prayer-song onto the picture. And together, they comprise my first religious memory, my first 'Hindu' memory, and my first awareness of being Hindu. That triptych of an image, a scent and a song belong to a connected sequence. And that sequence goes like this:

On January 20, 1948, at the Birla House grounds, in New Delhi when Gandhi was addressing his daily prayer meeting - not just a meeting, a prayer meeting - a low-grade explosion broke the congregation's peace. Gandhi did not, could not, know what had caused the explosion, but he said nonetheless to the agitated gathering "Suno, suno, suno sab suno... kuchh nahin hua hai... (Listen, listen, listen?it is nothing, it is nothing)" And then as the gathering's nervous chatter subsided he asked for Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram to be sung. And all became quiet, all became calm.

The explosion was from a small bomb which Madanlal Pahwa, a young Hindu refugee from Pakistan, had detonated. This was not a loner's doing. He was part of a plot to cause a commotion in the prayer meeting and use that moment of confusion and agitation to assassinate Gandhi. Pahwa's fellow conspirators slunk away unseen when, thanks to Gandhi's prayerful presence of mind and the congregation's maturity, the expected mayhem did not happen.

But.

On the evening of January 30, 1948, more than 2,000 kilometres away, in Madras, Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi, celebrated as 'MS', was listening to Saint Tyagaraja's devotional music on the radio when the programme was interrupted for an announcement. The Mahatma is no more. Shot dead. By a man said to belong to a militant Hindu organisation. She listened with thousands, stunned. A moment later, she heard her own voice over the same radio. All India Radio played, with great imagination and equal reflexes, immediately after the announcement a Mirabai song Subbulakshmi had recorded for Gandhi, through AIR:

This is a sequence, starting with an explosion that is followed by suno, suno and the becalming Raghupati Raghav, then going through January 30's three bullets and Ram! terminates in Subbulakshmi listening to her own Hari, tum haro jana ki bhir.

That sequence is my personal anchor in the religion of my forebears. The religion they thought of and spoke of, simply, as dharma or 'the right way of living'. Did they call that dharma 'Hindu'? I think they did, but when their forebears or their forebears began using the term 'Hindu', I cannot tell. I simply lack the scholarship. But this I know, they never ceased calling their belief dharma. They might have used 'Hindu' as a prefix or amplification to dharma, but it was dharma, doing right, that mattered. Dharma was their religion's doctrine, dharma its practice. Dharma pre-existed codes, shastras and samhitas. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan says so aptly, "Hinduism? is the union of reason and intuition that cannot be defined, but is only to be experienced?"

There is in the heart of the January 1948 sequence an extraordinarily dharmic chain of intuition and experience, which at the same time is extraordinarily aesthetic, dharmically aesthetic. Violence is perpetrated on a peaceful prayer congregation, an inherently adharmic act. And that is responded to not by counter-violence but by a call, spurred by intuition, for more prayer, the very antithesis of violence. Then violence returns with greater precision and diabolism, to be matched by greater prayer and the highest form of non-violent dharma-the living experience of death merging with a call to Rama, in a perfect act of surrender to the finality of God's will, without resentment or recrimination, in an appeal to God to receive his life, his soul, his all. And then, even as Gandhi's corporeal frame awaits co-mingling with the elements, the 'daughter of Madurai's goddess Meenakshi', muse of all devotion and only maestro of her kind, Subbulakshmi, listens to her own voice singing to all humankind the song of Mewar's daughter Mirabai seeking a deliverance for humanity from fear, from pain.

Fear. Pain. Fear of what? What pain?

Fear of the tyranny of violence, the pain that is inflicted by superior might. The song, Hari, tum haro jana ki bhir acknowledges the existence of tyranny, of brute force, of violence. And it admits, honestly and humbly, that fear of all those things exists, that pain is a fact of human life. It talks of Draupadi being saved from the lust of Duhshasana, the all-powerful demon Hiranyakashipu being slain by Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu, an elephant being rescued from the jaws of a crocodile, as examples of Divine Grace exerting the superiority of moral over physical force.

Dharma, Hindu dharma, as I see it from my utter theological ordinariness, grants that malevolence exists, both as a mega presence and in individual manifestations of it. The why and how of malevolence, of asuras, rakshasas, of 'evil' is not sought to be unravelled. The man who burst a bomb in the prayer meeting, it is said, thought he was doing his dharma. The man who shot Gandhi, he said, believed he was doing his dharma. And Gandhi, of course, was doing his, intuitively, experientially.

Whose dharma was the right dharma? Whose dharma was rightly Hindu?

The question beguiles.

It uses the cunning of argument, tarka, to give crime, aparadha, credit.

It subterfuges truth, subverts dharma.

Crime cannot rival its target, nor the criminal equal his victim. Hatred is no dharmic emotion and murder, self-definingly adharmic. There are, of course, exceptions-murder in self-defence or to save another in danger. But murder per se can neither requite any provocation, nor fulfil any injunction. It is, simply, base. Even as rape can never be dharmic, murder cannot cite scripture. If hatred may be termed a disease, murder has to be described as depraved. And mass murder, pogroms, such as terror or racism occasions, simply and utterly diabolic. The tyrannous Hiranyakashipu, the depraved Duhshasana and the metaphorical crocodile's razor-jaws are real and contemporarily so. To resist them, seeking Grace in so doing, is dharma.

To see in caste religious sanction is faddism, not dharma. To see in bigotry faith is viciousness, not dharma.

I am no expert in Arabic and am un-versed in the Holy Quran, but I would think iman comes close to dharma, as does conscience.

Who says all this, who feels so ?

Plain I.

A Hindu.

I, simple, inconsequential. I, who have no learning, no training in the agama or the Vedas, but possess like anyone else what Radhakrishnan has called "religious intuition" which Hindus know as dharma. The 'freedom' of a Hindu to self-define her or his dharma is the greatest asset that Hinduism confers. The same 'freedom', when used to subvert, subterfuge dharma is the cunning's sly theft of that asset.

To be dharmic is to be good and do right, it is not to be frightened by might. It is not to be a fool.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a retired administrator, diplomat and governor. He teaches history and writes columns for Indian dailies on matters old and of current interest

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